“I just want things to be good for Roger. I want a nice home. Bobby says we’ll have all that one day. He’s going to get a job in construction and we’re going to build a house with a big backyard.”
“Okay.” Edie leaned back against the booth and looked directly at Jessie. “Let’s say that happens. You go home tonight, Bobby tells you he’s got a job. He makes a ton of money, you build a house, have a couple more kids, maybe. Then, I don’t know, four or five years from now, Bobby decides he doesn’t want to be married anymore. Or you decide you want out. What then?”
Jessie frowned. “See, there’s never been anyone else for me or him. It’s like we just understand each other…”
“So you understand why he wants you to drop out of school? That’s what you told me last week,” she added when Jessie shook her head. “I can’t remember exactly what you said, but something about how he didn’t see any point to school.”
“He doesn’t.”
“You think that’s really why he wants you to drop out?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“No, that’s not why. Education gives you power and Bobby doesn’t want you to have power. If you have power, it threatens his control. He wants you powerless and under his control.”
Jessie looked at the baby, pink faced and long lashed, asleep in her arms. “I guess I should get going.”
“Why did you call me, anyway, Jessie?”
The girl smiled, clearly embarrassed. “I know, you must think I’m this big flake, calling you like it’s some big emergency…”
“Was it?”
“Bobby’s so hard to figure out. One day he’s real mean and the next day he tells me he’s sorry. He’s always buying me flowers and telling me he loves me. I guess I really want to believe him. I love Bobby and I want Roger to have a daddy.”
Edie looked from Jessie and the sleeping baby to the ketchup-smeared remnants of their lunch. She felt old and weary and jaded. This girl could be her daughter and the sleeping baby, her grandson. God, there was a thought to make you feel ancient. She wanted to help them both, though, but how? She was, she realized, completely out of her league. Jessie had hoisted the baby up on her back and was starting for the door. Edie took two twenties and a ten—all the money she had—from her billfold. When they were outside, she stuffed the bills in the pocket of Jessie’s jean jacket.
“You don’t have to stay, Jessie. You have control.”
“Thanks, Edie.” Jessie wrapped her in a quick hug. “You’re really sweet.”
“No, I’m not,” Edie said. “But I do care. Call me, okay? And stay in school.”
On an impulse, she walked over to the administration building and stuck her head around Peter’s office door.
“Mr. Darling’s in a staff meeting,” a secretary called out. “Can I give him a message?”
Edie smiled. “I’ll just leave a note on his desk.”
“Can’t wait for tonight,” she scrawled on a yellow Post-it note. Unoriginal, but exactly the way she felt.
HALF AN HOUR LATER, she was in Viv’s kitchen, watching her sister pipe intricate swirls of whipped egg yolk into hollowed-out whites. One tray already completed sat in the fridge, each egg a miniature work of art topped with tiny blossoms of red caviar and slivers of green chives. Viv had shown her the eggs and the carved-watermelon basket, the pinwheel salmon sandwiches and the puff-pastry shells waiting to be filled with a cream-cheese concoction. Edie had just shaken her head, lost for words.
“I know, I know.” Vivian’s smile was rueful. “I should stop knocking myself out, but we’re getting very involved in the community lately—Ray’s actually considering a run for city council. And of course, I’m on the Friends of the Library board and the hospital auxiliary and God knows what else, so we just decided we’d have a cocktail party and bring all these people together. I’m wondering, though, whether I should alternate the red caviar with black. Would that be more interesting, do you think?”
“I don’t know, Viv.” It’s just food, she wanted to say. Half the people who devour a deviled egg in two quick bites won’t even notice the fine touches. And hardly anyone will give a damn about the way the chives are cut just so. “It seems like a lot of work, though. Couldn’t you just compromise a little? Throw in some chips and dip? Some of those little hot dogs you mix with mustard and grape jelly?”
Viv gave her a look.
Edie grinned. “I used to like those. I thought everyone served those at parties.”
“Maybe your kind of parties.” Viv stood back to survey a finished egg. “What’s Mom doing? How’s the packing going? When I have a minute, we need to work out a schedule. We’ll need everything out of the house before we can list it. The Maple Grove people called me this morning. They’re thrilled that Mom’s going there. What do you think?” She held out an egg for Edie to inspect. “A tad top-heavy? No, I think it’s fine.”
Edie pulled a stool up to the counter, reflecting as she did that Viv shared Maude’s wall-of-sound verbal style, one topic blending into another, on and on, until Edie could feel her eyes glaze and her head begin to nod. She was starting to feel thankful that she didn’t, as far as she knew, share this particular trait, when she remembered Peter telling her that he thought her a lot like Maude.
“Have you even started clearing out Mom’s closets?” Viv asked. “I’ll be really mad if you go off and leave it all up to me.”
“Viv, I think you need to talk to Mom.” Edie braced herself. She hadn’t intended to bring up the subject. “She doesn’t want to go to Maple Grove. She told me this morning. I told her to tell you.”
Viv set down the knife she’d being using and sighed. “I honestly don’t have time to go over this again, Edie. We’ve gone over it a dozen times and I can’t seem to convince you—”
“Vivian, it’s not me you need to convince. Mom doesn’t want to leave her house. She’s made it quite clear.”
“As I said, I don’t have time for this. I’m planning a cocktail party for at least fifty people. Look, Edie. Please go, okay. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I can’t focus on what I need to do with you sitting there.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
PETER WAS HOLDING HER HAND. Edie watched the orchestra conductor point his baton at various players, his left arm making deep scooping movements. She heard a high thin note blossom through the auditorium—a flute, maybe, or it could be a clarinet for all she knew. Peter would know. His shoulder and arm, in a navy blazer, were touching hers. If she leaned fractionally closer, she could feel his bone structure. Up on the stage, the conductor had worked himself into a frenzy, crouching, leaping, shooting his arms everywhere.
Just before the music started, he’d leaned over to whisper in her ear. “The very first time I heard Mahler,” he’d said, “I honestly felt a shiver run down my spine. Just the pure magic of the orchestra’s sound. Eight octaves of harmony…” She’d felt his breath on her ear and felt a shiver run down her own spine that had nothing at all to do with Mahler.
Trumpets dominated now, and an assembled choir in burgundy gowns was belting forth. Peter’s fingers moved in her palm and she actually squirmed in her seat.
God. She tried to pay attention. “The first act starts in deepest night,” Peter had explained as the orchestra warmed up. “And then the fanfare comes in, and the day starts to wake up.” Her program lay open on her lap, and she glanced down at it. Too dark to read, but not too dark to see Peter’s white shirt cuff extending below his blazer, the back of his hand and his fingers clasped around hers. Or his thighs covered in gray flannel…well, maybe it wasn’t gray flannel, probably too hot for gray flannel, but headmasters wore gray flannel and she liked thinking of Peter as a headmaster.
And then something caused the audience to break into wild applause and Peter removed his hand from hers and joined in, vigorously clapping and smiling. She followed suit. It was like watching a football game and having no idea why everyone in the stands was hooting and stamping.
“Magnificent,” he whispered. “The naiveté of the beginning makes the sorrow seem so much more intense.”
“Mmm.” The music had started up again. A lone soloist singing, arms flung out to the audience. Edie stifled a yawn. She wanted Peter to hold her hand again. She’d give him ten seconds. If he didn’t reach for her hand again, she’d take the initiative. The soprano, if that’s what she was, had completely lost it now, clasping her bosom and staggering around the stage. Maybe this was where the love affair ended unsuccessfully. Another yawn threatened and Edie tightened her jaw to block it. Peter glanced sideways and with a sweet little smile caught her hand.
Edie squeezed her knees together and tried to remember what panties she was wearing. She needed a new supply. Hers were all dingy and boring. She’d never really been the lacy-underwear type. What kind of underwear would Peter wear? She couldn’t decide. Perhaps she’d find out tonight. No, too soon. Anyway, if she slept with him, where would they go? If Maude was already asleep, she wouldn’t hear them creep up the stairs, but it might feel kind of weird. What if Maude woke in the middle of the night, toddled into the room and found her youngest daughter and Peter in flagrante delicto?
Another outburst of applause, but this time Peter didn’t join in. “The violins were all over the place,” he whispered. Edie nodded sagely, relieved she hadn’t rewarded such inferior playing.
Okay, so if they couldn’t go to Maude’s, they certainly couldn’t go to his house. Not with a sister and four little girls, one of whom enjoyed Mahler. Edie was skeptical about that claim. If she drew the child aside, she was almost certain she’d learn that little Natalia—
Was that her name? No, Natalie—little Natalie had only been trying to please Daddy.
Daddy. Edie shifted in her seat. She was holding hands with Natalie’s daddy. Working out the logistics of sleeping with Natalie’s daddy. Frantic to rip the gray flannel trousers off Natalie’s daddy.
“MAGNIFICENT PERFORMANCE,” Peter said when they were seated on the couch back at Maude’s, sipping more of the port. “The second movement is…almost bucolic. If I close my eyes I can see peasants pairing up with the local musicians to create this music to dance it.” He turned to look at Edie. “You know, it just occurred to me, it’s rather like Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. The third movement before the storm when—”
Edie, who had been sitting quietly, was suddenly now convulsed with laughter, rolling around on the couch clutching her middle.
Peter watched her, bemused. Then the peals of laughter became contagious and he started laughing, too, but with no real idea why. Maude had gone to bed, and he wondered whether they might be keeping her awake. Not likely, he realized a moment later. Edie kept laughing, at one point extending a leg to kick her sandal across the room.
Finally, she subsided. Groaning, she swiped at her eyes. “God, Peter. I think I love you. You are so sweet and earnest and solemn about this… Kiss me, okay? Just kiss me.”
He did. She’d gone to the concert looking formidably elegant in a simple black dress, her hair arranged in a complicated knot at the back of her neck. By the time he finished kissing her, she lay almost horizontal across his lap, dress up around her thighs, hair tumbling about her shoulders as she smiled up at him. I think I love you, too, he wanted to say. The realization terrified him.
“I shall have to ask around to see whether that’s a common reaction to Mahler’s First,” he said.
She sighed. “Oh, Peter.”
He bent his head down toward her. “What?”
“Nothing, just oh, Peter.”
“And the joke was?”
“What was I laughing at?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Mmm.” With her finger, she traced his mouth. “Pent-up tension, I think. The music was so grand and solemn and we’re all dressed up like these proper, respectable people—”
“I am a proper, respectable person,” he said. “Aren’t you?”
“It’s debatable,” she said. “Plus, I seem to recall a remark you made outside the Olde Towne Bakery.” She watched his face. “Something about a raging uncouth beast full of uncontrollable lust…”
He grinned. “Oh, right.”
“So…” Still watching him, she loosened his tie, then unfastened the button beneath his collar. “If I keep doing this…” She undid another button, “Would I eventually release the beast?”
“Too late.” He lunged for her neck, pinning her down against the couch with his upper body. “Shall I ravish you here, or carry you up to your bed chamber?”
“Neither.” She slid out from under him, sat up and smoothed her hair. “At least, not tonight. Maude tends to wake up and I’m not sure her heart could stand it. I have to confess, though, that I sat through the entire concert so incredibly turned on by you that I couldn’t see straight and—”
Peter put his arm around her shoulders, pulled her close. “You weren’t hanging on to every note of the music, then?”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but no. I spent a great deal of time trying to decide where we would go if we decided to sleep together. Maude’s was out and then I thought of your house but you have the girls there and…”
Peter waited. Upstairs, he heard the creak of floorboards and then a door close. Edie leaned into his arm.
“The thing is, I’ve never been involved with a man who has children. Well, not the sole responsibility of children. The complexities of it all suddenly hit me…trying to find a place to be together, imagining your daughters’ reactions if they found me at your kitchen table the next morning. It just felt, I don’t know, strange and incredibly difficult, and I kept coming up with all these different scenarios and…” She turned her head to look at him. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“No, there is. I can feel it. Have I offended you?”
“Not at all.” He shook his head, but an almost imperceptible change of mood had taken place, a wisp of a cloud across the moon. Maude’s cuckoo clock announced midnight. Time to go.
“Hey…” Edie shifted on the couch to face him. “I’ve done or said something and I don’t think it’s just that I laughed at Mahler.”
“It’s very complicated, Edie.” He picked up his port, set it down again. “I haven’t quite sorted it out in my own mind. Perhaps it’s about keeping my daughters quite separate from my…”
Edie was watching him intently. “Romantic entanglements?”
He smiled. “Want to entangle?”
“Very much. But Peter…” She caught his hand, frowning down at it. “If you were in a serious relationship, you’d eventually have to bring the girls into it, right?”
“Of course.”
“Has that ever happened? Since your wife…”
“No.” He tried to come up with a way to describe Deborah that didn’t sound maudlin and sentimental. She was my soulmate, he wanted to say, I thought we’d be together for a lifetime. But Deborah was dead, and Edie, vibrantly alive, was sitting beside him, and he couldn’t seem to find a way to explain his feelings without feeling disloyal to Deborah or appearing to discount what he felt for Edie.
One of Maude’s knitted blankets had slipped down from the back of the couch and settled behind her back. She reached around and drew it across her knee, her face troubled. “I guess a relationship with a journalist who swoops into town and then swoops back out,” she said slowly, “is hardly likely to evolve into a serious one?”
“Edie.” He took her hand. “What is this all about? You could hardly have made it more clear that you’re not after a serious relationship. My sister would be furious to hear me say this, but your determination to avoid entanglement is one of the things I find so attractive about you.”
Her eyes still intent on his face, she nodded, as though coming to some kind of decision. “You’re absolutely right. Kiss me good-night and let’s forget this whole conversation.”
He stood up and leaned down, supporting himself by gripping the arm of the couch.
He rested his forehead against hers. “I can’t separate myself from being the girls’ father,” he said softly. “They’re part of who I am. But I like you very much. In fact, I think you’re wonderful.”
AFTER PETER LEFT, Edie carried the glasses they’d used into the kitchen and stood staring into the sink. After a moment, she heard Tinkerbell, out on a nocturnal prowl, scratching at the screen door. As she let him in, she glanced up the path and saw Panda and Poochie trotting toward the light. They were both black and she had difficulty telling them apart. One of them had a white paw, but she could never remember whether that was Panda or Poochie.
She yawned and thought about going up to bed, but the evening with Peter had left her restless and sensitized. The cats jostled for attention, sidling against her legs, twitching their tails. Tinkerbell batted one of the black cats on the nose. Edie pulled out a chair and sat down, drawing her knees up on the seat, watching the cats play on the yellowed linoleum floor. If she were a different kind of person, she would pick them up and coo over them. Feed them treats. Peter would want that kind of woman to meet his girls.
Ten minutes later, she lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling and thinking that if the phone was by the bed and not out in the damn hallway, she would call Fred. She got up, carried the phone to the stairs and called him, anyway. For the last month, he’d been between assignments and living at his home in Los Angeles, the home his wife, Annie, was always complaining that he never spent enough time in.
Annie answered and they chatted. Fred had already gone to bed, she said. “No, it’s only a little after ten here,” she cut off Edie’s apology. “Don’t worry about it. I never go to bed until one or two. Fred doesn’t usually, but he’s slowing down. Don’t tell him I said it though or he’ll divorce me. Want me to have him call you?”
“If you would.” Edie picked at her thumbnail. “Annie…this is probably going to sound like a weird question, but have you ever been sorry you married Fred? With him being gone all the time and everything?”
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